Where Will Obama’s Big Donors Come From?

Nick Confessore delves into the difficulty Obama fundraisers are having with Wall Street:

If Romney were the nominee, [former Goldman whiz kid Eric] Mindich asked, how would the Obama campaign go after him? Would it attack his record at Bain Capital? Would it attack the private-equity industry? Near him sat Blackstone's [Hamilton E.] James, who, just a few weeks earlier, had called attacks on private equity "vicious . . . inaccurate and unfair." Mindich and James are friends, and some in the room speculated that Mindich's question was for James's benefit.

Our target, [Obama campaign manager Jim] Messina assured the room, would be Mitt Romney and his record, not the private-equity industry. But the campaign, he added, couldn't control what the president's surrogates – like Priorities USA – might do.

James ultimately did not attend the fund-raiser, nor did Mindich. Others were also unpersuaded. Obama's finance team had already realized that if Wall Street was going to give less – potentially far less – than last time, other constituencies would have to give more. Hollywood, a reliable source of Democratic campaign cash, was looming larger in Obama's fund-raising calculations. So were tech entrepreneurs and gay donors.

Relatedly, Alec MacGillis recently reported on the about-face from many hedge-funders who supported Obama in '08:

For all the brashness and bravado that goes with their world, it seems the managers are oddly insecure about their purpose. For years, "most people in the financial service sector were viewed with enormous, out-of-the-box respect and adulation," says [Bill] Daley [former Obama chief of staff and J.P. Morgan Chase executive]. "These guys were on pedestals, and now that pedestal’s gone, and now, in a lot of people’s minds, the industry doesn’t have that glow, and that bothers them, and now they join that with the president and his theoretically bashing the wealthy. They’ve got to blame somebody, and they blame him because he is representative of that group of people who ‘aren’t us.'"